


Then Dawns A White Morning

by AstridContraMundum



Series: After-comers Cannot Guess [5]
Category: Endeavour (TV)
Genre: Christmas Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-29
Updated: 2018-12-29
Packaged: 2019-09-29 21:32:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17211335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstridContraMundum/pseuds/AstridContraMundum
Summary: Endeavour said it was the space between songs.Bixby wonders what life will be like now that the record has been flipped.An epilogue to As A Circling Bird





	Then Dawns A White Morning

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kmrjo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kmrjo/gifts), [gwendolynflight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gwendolynflight/gifts), [snickersnack](https://archiveofourown.org/users/snickersnack/gifts).



> Just a burst of fluff! :0)

It’s all easier than he ever would have imagined.

 

Once Endeavour comes home, he installs himself in the house and never leaves it. But Bix saw that coming this time around, and, so he says nothing.

 

Turner is in his glory—between the “poems in the woods” affair, and Jerome Hogg’s calumnious biography and all of the lawsuits it’s inspiring back home—Endeavour is one of the hottest properties the publishing house has going. He’s already got Endeavour under a new contract.

Bixby doubts highly that it was presented to Endeavour in quite that way, but that’s his assessment of the situation. Endeavour seems to think that Turner simply liked the different sort of things he wrote while he was in Scotland.

And, of course, Endeavour completely dismisses the effect of any publicity concerning that so-called biography. (“What?” he laughed. “Jerome Hogg? He hardly knew me. It must be filled with all sorts of delightful fictions and all-out lies,” he says, as if this fact should give Bix comfort.    Which it doesn’t.)

 Either way, Endeavour has an iron-clad excuse to stay inside, clacking away on his typewriter.

 

“And besides,” Endeavour says, one evening, stretching himself out as far as he can across the carpet. “I’m knackered. My legs sort of hurt.”

This doesn’t seem like Endeavour. He usually walks everywhere.

 “How long were you walking?” Bixby asks.

Endeavour appears to give the matter some thought. “I don’t know,” he says. “How long was I gone?”

 

Oh, for . . .

 

Bixby decides he’s better off just not knowing. Better to change the subject.

He had noticed that Endeavour's bag seems stuffed with something large and bulky—he's been hoping against hope it might be his favorite Italian jacket, but he’d been afraid to ask.

 Well, nothing ventured . . .

 

“Is that my jacket you have, stuffed in your bag upstairs?”

Endeavour winces a bit. “No,” he says. “It’s a kilt and a fly plaid.”

“Where on earth did you get that?”

“My landlady in Wick gave it to me. My grandmother was a Mackenzie.”

“Huh,” says Bixby. That makes for sort of an interesting picture—Endeavour wandering the moors in a kilt. Not a bad picture at all, really.

“Is that what you wore when you were in Scotland, then?” he asks. 

Endeavour laughs. “People don’t generally wear that sort of garb out and about, you know.”

“I know that,” Bixby says. “I was just wondering.” Bixby also can’t help but wonder if he might be persuaded to try the thing on.

Hmmmm.

Oh, but that Zegna—that’s what he had been asking about. “So, where’s my jacket, then?”

“Didn’t you get that check from Turner?” Endeavour asks. “I told him to send it here.”

That’s a very telling non-sequitur, but it’s also a rather evasive one.  “What’s that got to do with my jacket?” Bixby asks.

Endeavour turns his face away, so that he’s looking out the window. “I think I might have lost it somewhere, he says. “I was using it as a pillow.”

Bixby laughs. “Why didn’t you simply use a pillow as a pillow?”

“I didn’t always have one.”

 

Yes, Bixby decides he is definitely better off not knowing.  

Endeavour, on the other hand, decides no such thing.

 

His questions come in easy volleys, and Joss discovers that it’s not so terrible, after all, stepping out for a moment from Joss Bixby.

“When’s the first time you saw the sea?” “I was seven, we went to the Gulf of Mexico when we went to see my aunt in Pensacola.” “Do you have any brothers and sisters?” “No. I had four, but they all died before I was born.” “Did you really play as this what, wide receiver?” “Yes, for Lafayette High. We went to state twice, actually.” “Did you really go to Harvard?” “Well, yes and no. I went to Harvard, but I wasn’t a student there. I was already playing the market, but there were certain things I wanted to know. So, I got a job as a groundskeeper and I took my time when I was working around the business school, so that I could eavesdrop on lectures.”

“Sorry,” Bixby says. “If I had known I would meet you some day, I would have taken my time emptying the trash cans in the back of a philosophy seminar.”

 _“Trash cans,_ ” Endeavour laughs.

 

It was all just that easy.

 

He almost begins to think he’s going to pull the whole thing off without a hitch, when Endeavour pops up in the door of his study, and says, “You said, ‘pretty much.’ What do you mean by that, exactly?”

Bixby shrugs and pretends to go through some files, but what he’s really hoping is that Endeavour will get distracted, drift off, before he answers.

But instead, when Bixby looks up, he’s still standing in the door, as if he has all the time in the world.

It seems that, somehow, drinking a lemonade laced with hallucinogens and then wandering around on the moors for weeks has had the opposite effect on Endeavour than one would think it would have on most people. Something is definitely different about him since he’s been back. He’s much more focused, and that twist of stubbornness he noticed that first morning he was back has settled itself across his face.

“Just, well . . .” Bixby says, “general racketeering charges.  I was partners in a gambling ring for a while --that was illegal in Mississippi. I lived in a dry country, so there’s a few liquor-running charges there. I, well, I got a bit caught up in a money laundering scheme. But it was all to clean up gambling profits. . . nothing that really. . . I mean, those men knew what they were getting into.”

“I suppose,” Endeavour says. “But their families probably didn’t.”

Bixby knew that might be a bit of a sore point. Sure, you can say placing a bet here and there is all just in fun, but it sounded as if Endeavour’s father didn’t quite know when to stop.

“It seems like an awful lot of subterfuge,” Endeavour says. “Just for that and some charges of theft. How much did you take?”

Bixby continues to file through his papers.

“Joss?”

He tucks them away in his drawer.

“Well, how much?” Endeavour asks.

Bixby shrugs. “I’m not sure if I quite remember.”

“I highly doubt that,” Endeavour says. “More than a thousand?”

“Maybe,” Bixby says.

“More than ten thousand?”

Bixby shrugs.  

“Joss?”

“Yes, it was a little more than that.”  

“More than fifty thousand?”

“Well, you’re getting warmer.”

“Oh, my g . . More than a hundred thousand?”

 

Luckily, it’s still not completely impossible to divert him.

Bix closes the desk drawer and says, “They’ll be rehearsing for the Christmas concert soon, I’m sure. Are you sure you don’t want to go to choir practice?”

Endeavour scowls. “I’m sure.”

“I could drive you.”  

He laughs at this. “I’m perfectly capable of driving myself, if I want to go. And, besides, it’s barely a mile. I needn’t drive everywhere. I’m not American.”  

“Well, this way, all you would need to do is to go right from the car to the church and back. I could wait for you. I wouldn’t mind. I sort of like listening to practice. Puts you in the holiday mood.”

Endeavour just cuts him a look as if he’s not buying it. “I don’t need a warden,” he says, and, mercifully, slouches off.

 

Endeavour isn’t the type of person to knock someone over the head with things, though, Bixby will say that much. Once his curiosity is sated, he drops the subject.

 

 It’s just, well, a bit difficult to guess what the next subject might be.

 

One night, Bix is just on the brink of falling asleep when Endeavour presses himself up against him and says, “I want to hear you talk.”

“What do you mean?” Bixby asks. “You hear me talking all of the time; half the time you tune out what I say, anyway.”

He laughs. “You know what I mean, y’all.”

Oh.

“I can’t,” Bixby says simply. “It’s been far, far too many years. Besides, that’s not how you use y’all.”

“It isn’t?” Endeavour asks.  

“It’s a contraction. It’s “you all.” It’s meant to fill a void in English—second person plural. It’s like _ihr_ in German or _vous_ in French. You can’t use it when you are speaking to only one person. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Oh,” Endeavour says.

And how has he come to this? Endeavour sets himself warm and flush against him, and he gives him a grammar lesson?

Oh, God, it must be contagious.

*******

Another thing that is a bit different: every now and then, Endeavour has taken to sitting in the living room at the back of the house. It’s a room with tall windows that look out at the garden, two couches, a few chairs, and a television. Bixby hasn’t known Endeavour to watch the television before, so he isn’t sure what the new fascination with it is. But soon, Bixby comes to understand that he’s not really watching it; he’s simply using it as an excuse to look as if he’s doing something while he’s actually sleeping.

He’s sleeping like a rock, it seems, since he’s been back. Lord only knows what he’d been up to.

One evening, he’s stretched out, head leaning against the back of the couch, eyes half open, watching a movie. Joss picks his feet up, sits down on the end, and then deposits them back on his lap.

“What are you watching?” Bixby asks.

“A movie,” Endeavour says.

Bixby huffs a laugh at that. Endeavour can name the third wife of King Edolic the Goutful who lived in effing 740, but he never knows the names of any movies— unless it’s some Swedish thing that won the Swaggolomdow Award for Inscrutability.

Bixby looks at the screen, and it takes him about three seconds to realize he’s watching _It’s A Wonderful Life._  It’s odd hearing Jimmy Stewart, with his distinctive voice, dubbed into French.

“If you were George Bailey, I’d be Harry Bailey,” Endeavour says.

As with a lot of things he says, this takes some working out. Then, Bixby gets it: Harry Bailey. He was the brother who fell through the ice, the one who was dead in the alternate reality because George had not been there to save him. Endeavour is thinking that if it wasn’t for Bixby, he would have died, frozen to death, passed out in the woods around the lake house.

He doesn’t seem at all maudlin about it. Bix wishes he sort of would be. It’s bothers him no end, sometimes, how he can say such things so matter-of-factly.

“Well, Bixby says. “If you were George Bailey, I’d be Henry Potter.”

This prompts that funny laugh, the one that’s like air being let out of a balloon.

Endeavour thinks he’s joking, but it’s all too true. Some may say it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. But Bixby has found out he’s rather an exception to that rule. He can see now, that over the past few weeks, he hadn’t at all fallen back into being easy-going, fun-loving Bixby. He’d actually been turning into a complete tyrant.  

“I doubt that,” Endeavour says. “Besides the metaphor doesn’t work for that character. He was the same in both realities.”

“What?” Bixby asks. “Oh.”

Does he need to quibble about that? He’s missing the bigger point.

In fact, if he _did_ get the bigger point, if he actually knew the truth of it, it’s quite possible he wouldn’t be sitting here with him now.

But. Well.

  
“Fine,” Bixby concedes. “Then I’d be that bartender, Nick.”

Endeavour looks at him questioningly. “Who is that?”

“You know, the bartender at Martini’s place. He was a pleasant enough fellow in Bedford Falls, but in Pottersville he’s a complete arse.” He mimics the man’s exaggerated Jersey accent” “We serve hard drinks for men who want to get drunk fast. And we don’t need any characters to give the joint ATmosphere, see?”

Endeavour perks up at this.

“Is that how you used to talk?”

“In Mississippi?” Joss asks, raising his eyebrows incredulously. Then he’s laughing. “No. Not by a long shot.”

 ******

Is it healthy for someone to never go outside? Don’t people need vitamin D? He _is_ English, but still . . . .

By the second week of December, Joss can’t help but begin to worry: is Endeavour going to spend the rest of his life within these walls, like some sort of refugee, hiding from his own life? 

 *****

Then, there dawns a white morning, when Bix opens his eyes and looks out the large window by the bed to find that the ground and the trees are blanketed, bright with snow. And the whole world is white except for a blush of pink in the east.

Bixby turns to tell Endeavour, but Endeavour is already gone, which is odd, considering it’s just gone seven.  He’s been sleeping lately as if he’s been catching up on a month’s worth.

And then, Bixby notices something else, too. The jumble of fir cones that usually rolled about on his bedside table are gone, too.

Bixby wanders downstairs from room to room, but he can’t find Endeavour anywhere in the house. At a back door, he sees a line of footsteps in the snow, heading out into the woods.

He pads back to the front of the house and pulls his black wool coat out of a wardrobe, putting it on over his pajamas. He shoves his feet into a pair of boots and walks out the door, around the house to the back, to where the prints begin, and he follows them.  

He’s only about two hundred feet into the trees when he sees Endeavour, carefully depositing fir cones in a line on the ground. He’s dressed already, in a grey coat and even a scarf, his face pink with the cold.

“I found there are some red squirrels up in that tree,” he says, his words coming in clouds of steam. “I thought they might like these, now that there’s snow.”

“Why were you keeping them?” Joss asks.

“It was just a game I was playing.”

“What sort of a game”?

Endeavour pauses, considering him. “How much do you know about Plato?” he asks.

“Absolutely nothing,” Joss says.

He tilts his head and asks, “How much do you _want_ to know about Plato?”

Joss laughs. “Honestly? Absolutely nothing.”

Endeavour laughs, too, and Joss can feel it, a slow unwinding.

He’s been trying not to look at him like that, but the truth was, he was beginning to wonder if Endeavour would ever go outside. But he knows that, once he’s taken that first step, he’ll roll on as if the past few weeks hadn’t happened. Once he finally makes his decision, he always follows through.

They’ll be all right.

And even the cold feels right—it’s dry and crisp and—the kind that makes your lungs burn a bit, the kind that makes you feel all the more alive.

Endeavour nods, as if he finds this satisfactory. “I don’t care for Plato much, either,” he says. “And it doesn’t matter anyway,” he adds, placing the last cone down. “I don’t need these anymore.”  

Endeavour straightens and brushes his hands together, then turns and looks up into the trees.

“Happy Christmas!” he calls, in that crisp, efficient way the English have.

And then, suddenly, it’s all easier than he would have thought. Joss lets his voice melt from warm and polished, to smooth and easy, as if he’s got all the time in the world to speak, and that’s exactly what they’ll have—all the time in the world. 

Joss looks up into the trees and calls, “Merry Christmas, y’all.”

Endeavour whirls around, as if he’s heard a stranger behind him, but then he catches Joss’s eye, and he’s laughing, and it’s the same laugh as the water rolling against that dock in Oxfordshire.

 

 

 


End file.
